Worlds First 3-D Printed Human Corneas Could One Day Treat Blindness

June 12, 20186:02 pm

Scientists have 3D printed corneas for the first time in new research, offering hope to millions of people around the world whose eyesight is affected by damage to the delicate tissue. The cornea is a clear sheath that sits over the iris and the pupil, helping to direct light rays onto the retina. If the cornea becomes damaged, the image sent to the brain can become blurry. Currently, patients with damaged corneas can undergo transplants in serious cases, but this necessitates a donor—of which there is a significant shortage.

Approximately 10 million people need surgery to prevent corneal blindness, while a further 5 million people are totally blind because the tissue is damaged or diseased.

Now, a team at Newcastle University in the U.K. believes it has paved the way for an unlimited supply of corneas, using a 3-D printer to create them in a lab.

The researchers took corneal stem cells from a healthy donor and mixed them together with alginate and collagen to create a printable “bio-ink.” This solution was then placed inside a simple 3-D printer.

The scientists were able to print a 3-D cornea in less than ten minutes. Building on previous work by the team showing stem cells can be kept alive for weeks at room temperature in a hydrogel similar to the bio-ink, the cells were shown to culture in the artificial cornea. As the corneas are easily printable, they can be created to match the size and shape of a patient’s eye.

“Theirs is the first to be printed with a curved shape, as previous versions featured layers of cells,” Che Connon, Professor of Tissue Engineering at Newcastle University and lead author of the study said. The resulting paper was published in the journal Experimental Eye Research.

“Many teams across the world have been chasing the ideal bio-ink to make this process feasible,” Professor Connon commented in a statement.

The gel, which is a combination of alginate and collagen—keeps the stem cells alive while producing a material which is stiff enough to hold its shape but soft enough to be squeezed out the nozzle of a 3-D printer.

“Now we have a ready-to-use bio-ink containing stem cells allowing users to start printing tissues without having to worry about growing the cells separately.”

Professor Connon said, “Despite the well-organized eyebank systems in developed nations, health care professional struggle to meet demand. That’s partly due to the increasing use of refractive [laser eye] surgery and eyes that have undergone refractive surgery currently cannot be used for transplantation. If we look more widely in less developed nations, eye-banking is poorly developed and an alternative that allows a rapid development of corneas, such as 3-D printing, would really be very useful.”

Professor Connon predicts the technology could be available in a minimum of five years, if clinical trials are a success.

“We are thinking ahead and imagining a situation where a doctor’s surgery has a 3-D printer in the corner, and a doctor can pull an ink from the shelf, plug it in and print.”

About Nelson Régo

Nelson Régo is the owner and founder of the Cool Blind Tech website since November of 2012. Nelson launched the first show on March 14, 2013. He also directs the website as a whole, hiring staff, originating new shows, and approving all content.

Not a month has gone by since We posted an article on Narrator including AI-driven image tags and Microsoft is back at it yet again, though with an older project which finally has made public fruition. Introduced at Build 2016, this project had a goal of bringing powerful image recognition technology which could be used to augment every day life, especially when combined with the power of the cloud.

The app uses artificial intelligence and the camera on your iPhone to perform a number of useful functions.

Reading documents, including spoken hints to capture all corners of a document so that you capture the full page. It then recognizes the structure of the document, such as headings, paragraphs and lists, allowing you to rapidly skip through the document using voiceover.

Identifying a product based on its barcode. Move the phone’s camera over the product; beeps indicate how close the barcode is – the faster the beeps, the closer you are – until the full barcode is detected. It then snaps a photo and reads the name of the product.

Recognizing people based on their face, and providing a description of their visual appearance, such as their gender, facial expression and other identifying characteristics.

Recognizing images within other apps – just tap Share, and Recognize with Seeing AI.

In our experience, the app is able to even read computer screens in the short-text channel mode, and does so instantly as you move your arm towards and away from text. Reading coupons in a newspaper is more intuitive than having to wait for a picture to be snapped, and bar codes are often recognized in under 30 seconds thanks to the way it guides the user to it. Face recognition works well and can be taught to recall faces of loved ones after you take 3 pictures of them. Easily, this app rivals more expensive solutions and will become a must-have tool within any vision-impaired iOS user’s arsenal. The incredible power of Seeing AI lies in not just the cloud, but also at being able to perform this recognition offline and in real-time. Turning airplane mode on during a page scan still kept up with scrolling printed text, however features such as bar code and face/scene detection will require one.

Join Jessica to understand just how intuitive the app really is in this podcast and see for yourself what Seeing AI can do, as not even ten thousand words could give it full justification. She walks through the app, from the quick start guide to the various channels in great detail.